Quantifying the Similarity in Perceptions of Multiple Stakeholders in Dingcheng, China, on Agricultural Drought Risk Governance

• Main Authors: Yaoyao Wu, Hao Guo, Jing’ai Wang
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2018-09-01
• Series: Sustainability
• Subjects: drought risk governance; multi-stakeholders; perception; similarity; consensus
• Online Access: http://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/10/9/3219

In recent years, integrated disaster risk governance of multi-stakeholders, multi-scales, and multi-measures has received great attention. The way different stakeholders perceive how the risk of drought is governed affects their coordination in dealing with drought. Quantifying the extent to which the perceptions of different stakeholders are similar will deepen understanding of how they cooperate; this will subsequently improve regional integrated drought risk governance and promote regional sustainable development of agriculture. An indicator system of perception similarity and a model were constructed around the perceptions of government managers (G), village committees (V), and households (H) in Zhoujiadian Town, of the drought risk governance. Based on perspectives of “bottom-up” and “horizontal-vertical”, the effort led to the following main conclusions: (1) The perception similarity of homogeneous stakeholders is quite different, sorted by the values as G > V > H; (2) The greater the hierarchical difference between stakeholders, the more marked the differences between their perceptions, as sorted by the values as G&V > V&H > G&H; (3) All stakeholders have obvious perception differences in the fairness of the allocation of disaster relief funds and the most suitable recovery methods. Considering the needs of multiple stakeholders in integrated risk governance, the paper quantified the differences between individuals through a study of perception similarity, which makes up for the shortcomings in the current research—which only considers the perception of stakeholders—and provides new ideas and references for further exploration of rational system design, optimization of cooperation efficiency, and consensus of multiple stakeholders in integrated drought risk governance.